blow through your heart
by avaire
Summary: She thinks about her loss.


It's not that Faye likes to torture herself. She's no masochist. At least not consciously.

She's just a bit broken, yes, a bit jagged: a shard of glass half-buried in fine grains of sand. A couple of her edges poke through the surface, sharp and ready to make innocent toes and the soles of tender feet bleed. She's not yet dulled by time.

Or…maybe. Maybe she's been dulled. Maybe she has dulled herself. She can't tell anymore.

It must be the numbness. She feels the numb tingle and cool her fingertips, the back of her neck, her dry bottom lip. _Feel it, Faye. _The numb urges her to action, but action is no longer possible.

Numbness implies paralysis. Paralysis implies stasis. Stasis implies decades of decay in silent—_space!—_oblivion, a cold narrow coffin. A surgery to repair a body preserved in ice. A girl with no past and no future. One Faye Valentine. Call for Faye Valentine!

_Yes, this is she. Sorry I can't answer the phone right now. I'm—_

Paralyzed.

And stupid.

She sits on the edge of her bed, cigarette dangling from her left hand. It's kinda fun smoking with her non-dominant hand. It requires more effort, even conscious thinking on her part. Fingers around smoke. Smoke around fingers. Lift fingers to face. Touch lips to cigarette. Take a drag. Blow out.

She should have seen it coming. Spike was no hero. He could never be a hero. He was selfish and self-centered and self-loathing. A jackass. Faye tries not to think of waking to his face in a dark hollow room, tries to forget a pile of television sets transmitting nothing of remote importance. Just bullet holes.

And he sat there. Sits there. Smirking. Shoulders hunched. He does not admit he's been waiting three hours for her to wake up. She does not expect him to ask if she's okay. She's happier when he has nothing to say.

Silence is comfort. _His_ silence anyway. Now _her_ silence is everywhere on the ship, suffocating and liberating. His Silence is gone, good bye, _I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out something something something alive. _Live_. _

Bang. A clean shot right through her left ventricle. You do not tether me to life. You aren't anything to me.

So she smokes. With her right hand she flips the lighter's lid open and closed, open and closed. She craves that control she has over the flame. That flicker belongs to her and her alone. She tells this force of nature to turn on. She tells this force of nature to turn off. Like love and the stifling of love; so simple. She wishes it were actually like that. Which is, of course, the heart of the matter.

Fuck.

"Fuck!"

She springs to her feet, hands balled into fists at her sides. The long abused Zippo clatters onto the floor. The cigarette lands somewhere near her sheets, and she should care about that, but she doesn't care about that. Doesn't want to care about anything. What she wants is to cry and cry and cry now, cry later, cry because it'd be so fulfilling, emotional release, catharsis and letting go and drifting away. But as she trembles no tears drip down her nose or squeeze between thick lashes. She's been crying all night, and that's enough. Here comes the fury. Hounding.

I'm bleeding for you, Spike. Here's to your stupid face.

She turns to mirrors. Faye always turns to mirrors when she wants confirmation, but of what? she's not entirely sure. She just wants Confirmation with a capital C (for crazy, crazed), and she gets it in the form of swollen eyelids, violet strands sticking to her cheeks, black mascara streaks, reddened nose. Sniffling has made her ugly, and when she thinks about the hold that woman had on Spike she no longer laughs or finds it odd.

Of course he loved her. Of course he had loved Julia. She had been composed by musicians and poets alike, a swelling sadness, a muse in face and form. She looked like the angel God set upon scoundrels, but her lessons were not taught by mercy. They were instructed by fists to the jaw and kicks to the groin. She had been the picture of femme fatale, a singing siren that had lured men like Vicious and men like Him in equal measure.

Spike had gone to die on her pyre.

Beautiful, no?

Faye stared into her own green eyes. They would never narrow the way Julia's had. Faye's eyes were too expressive. She did not know how to withdraw. She could not be blank. She could never be the canvas onto which obsessive men painted their souls. And the loneliness?

Call it a bonus.

* * *

_A/N: The title is taken from the song "Wild is the Wind" by Nina Simone. _


End file.
